The Ambiguous Reputation Of The Peace Prize

PARIS — When Andrew Carnegie founded his Endowment for International Peace in 1910, he instructed the trustees that when ``war was discarded as disgraceful to civilized man, the trustees will please then consider what is the next most degrading evil or evils whose banishment . . . would most advance the progress, elevation and happiness of man.`` It was an age of confidence.

Alfred Nobel was less optimistic. Having invented dynamite, making war more convenient to conduct-it was a more stable and efficient explosive than its predecessors-he argued that his invention was so horrible in its effects that men would give up war. He seems to have failed to convince himself.

He left his fortune to provide prizes encouraging peace and human advancement in the sciences and literature. But the Nobel Peace Prize has itself acquired an ambiguous reputation, its laureates` qualifications as peacemakers open to more than occasional doubt.

Take the American laureates, for example. The first was Theodore Roosevelt, in 1906, for his mediation in the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt`s reputation, at least among Americans, was better assured by his Rough Riders` charge up San Juan Hill during a ``bully war`` in Cuba than by the Portsmouth Treaty of 1904.

The next American to win the prize, in 1912, was Elihu Root, the first Roosevelt`s secretary of state in 1905-09, subsequently active in the arbitration of a North Atlantic fisheries dispute with Britain. His government career included five years as secretary of war, distinguished by major organizational reforms in the U.S. Army, introduction of the principle of the general staff and establishment of the Army War College.

Woodrow Wilson was next, in 1919, for his ``Fourteen Points`` for settling the world war. Well-meaning as Wilson was, 70 years later it is necessary to say that his principles were deeply unrealistic, actually contributed to that instability in Germany and East-Central Europe which Hitler subsequently was to exploit to provoke a second world war, and that Wilson`s moralizing approach to international affairs has had a pernicious influence on American policymaking ever since 1919.

The most recent American to win the prize was Henry Kissinger, for negotiating a nominal and illusory settlement of the Vietnam War-to whose enlargement he had contributed in previous years. His co-laureate, North Vietnam`s negotiator, Le Duc Tho, had the good taste, or delicacy of conscience, to decline the prize. Kissinger took it.

This year`s prize, to the United Nations` peacekeeping forces, is welcome.

The peace prize edifies when it goes not to government figures to reward them for acts actually motivated by national interest, but to organizations or individuals attempting to limit the scale of conflicts, reduce suffering, limit the scale of war or find a resolution to problems which might lead to war. Thus the UN peacekeepers, the International Red Cross (1917 and again in 1963), the Nansen International Office for Refugees (1938), the American and British Friends` Service organizations (1947), the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (1954 and 1981), the UN Children`s Fund (1965), Amnesty International (1977).

The appropriate individual choice this year would have been the UN secretary general, Javier Perez de Cuellar, who has revitalized the UN`s diplomacy and, more than any other outsider, is responsible for a cease-fire in the Persian Gulf war, as well as initiating new efforts to resolve conflicts in southern Africa and elsewhere. The award to the UN peacekeeping forces can be taken as an indirect tribute to him.